The sudden carnage remains unexplained for the time being. At the end of February, a carpet of several hundred, even thousands, of dead bees strewing a bed of bushes in a park in Marseille was found by Clean My Calanque, a waste collection association. An unusual discovery that contrasted with the usual plastics, cans and other packaging and piqued the curiosity of the association. “We had taken a few specimens to send them to a laboratory”, then told Eric Akopian. “Their results ruled out the trail of contamination or pesticides,” he returned a month later. “Beekeepers have mentioned the gel or a virus”. But it was not really cold in this period and the hive was not nearby. And if a virus had raged, why would these bees all have died in the same place?
An anecdote that also puzzles Aurore Avargues-Weber, researcher in cognitive ethology and bee specialist at the CNRS. “This very localized aspect is surprising. It could be food poisoning, but it would have had to be really devastating, ”she says. Similarly, if the dose of pesticide had been too low to be detected in the laboratory “the bees would not all have died in the same place, they would have been disoriented and scattered”.
Finally, the explanation could be very simple and finally suit a certain Marseille tendency to get rid of bulky items just anywhere. “Perhaps someone just put them there after killing the bees from a hive that had taken up residence there. And in this case, she would have used an insecticide spray for individuals which is not composed of the same molecules as pesticides and would not have been detected during the analysis”, suggests the researcher.
His colleague Martin Giurfa has another attractive and coherent idea: “One can imagine that it was a wild colony whose hive was destroyed by the cutting of a tree. It may also be an old piece of furniture that has finally been picked up. Still, without their hive, in February, these bees, which keep their hive at a constant temperature of 33-34°C, got together to try to spend the night but died of cold”, imagines- he. A plausible explanation for a story of which we will probably never have the end word. Still, behind that “there is undoubtedly the hand of man”, concludes Martin Giufra.